In today's highly computerized society, it is well established that computers must provide a comfortable environment for the end users. Such environments are typically created by providing user-friendly hardware devices (e.g., a mouse) and software systems (e.g., graphical user interfaces). The efficacy of these systems is often further enhanced by their ability to be configured to meet the specific preferences of a user. Thus, users can personalize such things as the background color on their computer screen, mouse click rates, options within a specific software application, start-up screens, etc. This ability to personalize, or set preferences, allows computer systems to be tailored to meet the specific needs of the end-user to thereby provide a consistent and comfortable environment.
Concurrent with the goal of providing a user-friendly environment in order to advance computers in today's society is the proliferation of computer networks. Computer networks, such as the Internet, the World Wide Web, intranets, local area networks (LANS), etc., allow remote computers to exploit the resources of other, often more powerful, computer systems. The combination of a user-friendly environment with a computer network is therefore seen to be of particular importance as new computer systems are developed. For example, new systems such as IBM's Network Stations, seek to provide inexpensive, yet powerful, computer workstations by exploiting the power of a computer network while maintaining an advanced work environment.
Of particular importance in this invention is the recognition of the need to provide networked workstations which can not only be configured to the specific hardware characteristics of a terminal, but also to the preferences of a particular user, group of users, system administrator, owner, or manufacturer. Prior art solutions for configuring workstations in a network are unfortunately limited in various respects, including the fact that workstation preferences do not change based upon the end user, but rather exist for each individual workstation. Thus, under the prior art, individual preferences are unable to follow the user to any workstation in the network. Moreover, there is no way to save and meaningfully use appropriate sets of preferences for the individual currently using the workstation. That is, there is no known way to make the administration of preferences a manageable task. For example, there is no known way to provide for ad hoc groups of user preferences for local administrator defined levels of support.
While it is known to use preference files for configuring workstations in applications in a network, prior solutions only allow preference files to be managed at two levels, at the installation level (where default parameters are incorporated for each workstation) and at the user level (where the user alters the default parameters for a specific workstation). Thus, under the prior art only two "entities" or factors influence the final configuration of each workstation. This invention recognizes this as a serious limitation because there are many additional factors that should influence how a workstation is configured. For example, user groups, system administrator preferences, specific terminal hardware, time/date of logon, etc. are all factors that could potentially be used to influence the configuration of a particular workstation. The prior art fails to provide a comprehensive solution for utilizing preference files to incorporate such factors into workstation configuration.
In summary, the prior art does not allow the preferences of a user to follow him or her around to any workstation in a network, nor does it provide a comprehensive means for incorporating additional factors into each workstation configuration. Thus, without a more comprehensive approach to configuring workstations in a network, the overall flexibility of the network will be limited. All of the aforementioned art and technology references are herein incorporated by reference.